Evil: Interdisciplinary Explorations

Evil is a recurrent theme across diverse accounts of human experience. But despite its ubiquity – and, in fact, sometimes precisely because of its ubiquity – human beings perpetually struggle to come to terms with it, whether individually or collectively. In academia, the idea of evil has provoked widespread reflection in the humanities and beyond. Whether the medium is philosophical treatise, theological doctrine, historical analysis, literary expression or something else besides, examining the theme of evil is a necessary aspect of exploring representations of humanity.

This conference is intended to bring together thinkers from a variety of disciplines and traditions, in order to illuminate this shared feature of human experience and academic reflection. It seeks to provoke dialogue between heterogeneous approaches to the issue, from attempts at definition in moral philosophy to those modern philosophers who seek to go beyond evil, to literary, theological, and historical approaches.

Keynote Speakers:

• Terry Eagleton (University of Lancaster): ‘On Evil’
• Pamela Sue Anderson (University of Oxford): ‘A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Evil’

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